A couple of original plays on non-normative liaisons passed through town this month. From Delhi, The Films and Theatre Society’s Dad’s Girlfriend raised the subject of an autumn–spring relationship, while The Forbidden Productions (Mumbai) partnered with our own The Creative Arts on The Chai Queens, about the queer love of two girls, now adults.
Writer-director Atul Satya Koushik presents a comedy on a celebrity who left his family for the US and who comes back to India to meet his married daughter whom he last saw as a baby. At an event here, he becomes pally with an obviously besotted fangirl to the point of inviting her to stay in his room at his daughter’s flat, much to the latter’s bafflement. Post-facto, he seems rather naively clueless when she says she loves him and wants a life together. The situation recalls Neil Simon’s I Ought to Be in Pictures, where a daughter travels to her estranged father’s home and meets his girlfriend, who has for some time hoped to get a commitment from him.
Koushik’s characterization of an America-acculturated Dad rendered tongue-tied by the girl’s declaration sounds far-fetched in this day and age, though Shailesh Lodha makes a convincing stage debut in the role. More positively, the three other cast members don’t get inhibited by his star presence: Anumeha Jain (the daughter) and Megha Mathur (the girlfriend) play off each other’s given circumstances, whereas Aman Bajpai garners most of the laughs as the house-husband, a freelancing theatre actor, who in the father’s view “has no job”. Meanwhile, every morning a smoke machine belches fumes into the flat for no conceivable reason.
The Chai Queens melds a storyline by Taranjit Kaur with Vikrant Dhote’s script So Far, alongwith further interpolations from Archana Patel and Ramanjit Kaur. The two women meet unexpectedly at a wedding; one has become a wife and mother, the other has remained single. They reminisce about their sweet teen friendship, frowned upon by parents who had suspected them of doing things they should not have done. Ramanjit directs some evocative moments, like the two girls playing under a sheet with a torch and arranging their dolls’ marriage ceremony. Taranjit and Archana enact a complementary pair of convention and rebellion.
The play proceeds to the Prague Fringe in May. Its present 45-minute duration, dictated by that festival’s regulations, leaves considerable room for fleshing out—something that the three of them should definitely work on after they return.
25 April 2025